Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Every spring at commencement time Poor Elijah waits for his phone to ring. He figures sooner or later the world will get tired of famous people and give him a call.
In the meantime he contents himself with delivering a few brief remarks on my porch. I never know what to expect. This year he showed up dressed like a professorial cross between the late Chief Justice Rehnquist and Sir Thomas More.
“Nice robes,” I conceded as he billowed by.
“I sewed the stripes on myself,” he acknowledged modestly.
If you’ve got a few minutes, I see a couple of seats over by the fuchsia.
Make yourself at home.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
I didn’t attend my college graduation. I objected to the ceremony on moral grounds. This made sense since I’d spent the past four years majoring in objecting to things on moral grounds. My own prevailing wisdom held that traditions like commencement and Mother’s Day got in the way of real life.
At 21 I was an expert on real life.
At 66 I still am.
This is my way of warning you that I didn’t know much then, and I still don’t know much. Hopefully, though, I know more than I used to. You have to be pretty dense not to learn any lessons after half a century.
Given our respective ages, this means I probably know more than you do. I hope that doesn’t offend you. Lots of you have most likely grown up being fed the nonsense that a child’s perspective and opinion should count as much as an adult’s.
When it comes to ice cream flavors, that’s generally true. But in matters of good and evil, crime and punishment, courage, cowardice and compromise, experience tells.
I do know more about life than I did. Regrettably, over those intervening years what I’ve done has too often fallen short of what I’ve known, so I can’t hold my conduct up as an example.
Why then should you listen to me? It’s simple. I’m here to tell you to do as I say, not as I did.
Back in the good old days before I believed in Mother’s Day, I would’ve called me a hypocrite. That’s what you called somebody who expected other people to live up to standards he didn’t meet himself. I’ve learned since that falling short of your hopes and expectations doesn’t make you a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is pretending you haven’t fallen short.
Anyway, it seemed to me then that the world was full of people who didn’t live up to their own expectations. It also seemed like most of them were telling me what to do.
Naturally, I took action. Churchgoers didn’t practice what they preached, so I discarded faith. Enemies shook hands politely, so I abandoned courtesy. Those around me tallied their possessions, so I discounted ambition and hard work. They lied, so I became brutally honest, except with myself.
You are coming of age in an age where careful speech is out of fashion, and humility withers in the shadow of our epidemic narcissism.
I overreacted. Lots of people did. And the world in many respects became a darker, ruder, less earnest place in our wake.
Why then should you listen to me?
The first reason is it’s your turn to overreact, and I’m hoping you won’t. I’m hoping you’ll consider that the world isn’t as simple as it seems. I’m hoping you won’t swallow the perennial fiction that this is a new age that demands new rules.
Love and hate, truth and deceit, loyalty, valor, regret and forgiveness are as old as the stones.
I’m also thinking ahead to the day when you’re where I am, and I’m not. I’m thinking of the time when your children and your grandchildren are the graduates, when you’re supposed to be wearing the mantle of wisdom, and it doesn’t fit.
I’m a teacher. My job is passing on what I know and understand. True, the better part of what I do concerns reading, writing and history. But like it or not, every day my students get a dose of me and the way I look at things.
Now think of all the people who get a dose of you.
It’s enough to make you shut your mouth, isn’t it?
That’s OK. Sometimes you probably should. Me, too. There’s nothing wrong with silence when you don’t have anything worthwhile to say.
In the end, being a person is a lot like being a teacher. I have a job to do. I have information and experience and insight to pass along. True, some is misinformation and lamentable experience and myopic insight. That’s why I need to be careful with my words. It’s also why you need to be careful with my words.
By all means, be a skeptic. Nobody’s disagreed with me more than I have. But skeptics don’t block their ears because what they hear may be false or ill-conceived. They just listen more carefully.
They also speak more carefully, and more humbly.
You are coming of age in an age where careful speech is out of fashion, and humility withers in the shadow of our epidemic narcissism. We swallow whole what we like to hear and reserve our skepticism for “messages” that offend our sensitivities and frustrate our appetites.
Beneficiaries of affluence and ease glibly call for revolution without the slightest understanding of what revolution means or revolution costs. They rail against the “establishment” without the vaguest recognition that they are the establishment.
Others embrace a promoter who preaches pseudo-populism from the comfort of his gilded tower and gated country clubs. They wink at his deceits and chant his name, even as his impolitic words and self-absorbed deeds betray his contempt for ordinary people, ordinary truth, and ordinary morality.
Televised narcissists disgrace themselves for a fast buck and a flash in the spotlight, and we call it reality. Politicians tweet, and we call it wisdom. Children stare blankly at silicon screens, refrigerators post pictures of the food inside them, and we laud the wonders of technology.
We are living through troubling times.
There’s nothing new about prophesying decline and disaster. It’s something Socrates and my grandfather had in common. “What’s the world coming to?” they asked.
This isn’t a question only for grandfathers. Above all others, it should be your question.
It is for each of you to say with humility what you think. It is for each of you to reflect with skepticism on what you see and hear.
I hope, as you do, that you’ll remember this: Circumstances change, but virtues don’t.
Godspeed.
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